Depth, standings allow Pop to tinker

CLEVELAND — One glance at the Spurs’ remaining schedule explains why coach Gregg Popovich has spent so much time this season fretting about keeping his players fresh.

Shoehorned into the next 23 days are 16 games, beginning with tonight’s contest at Quicken Loans Arena against the Cleveland Cavaliers. It opens one of the team’s five back-to-backs in April. There also is one series of back-to-back-to-back games, with a key contest against the Lakers sandwiched in between games at Golden State and Sacramento.

There are four games in the final five days of the season, the last two a road back-to-back.

Never has Popovich been happier to have one of the deepest rosters in club history, with a fifth big man, the versatile Boris Diaw, added in March.

It helps, too, that the Spurs enter this busiest stretch of the 66-game schedule solidly entrenched in the No. 2 spot in the Western Conference. With six fewer losses than the third-place Lakers, Popovich can rest key players with relative impunity.

“In this 16-in-23 (stretch), you definitely have to rest guys along the way and not worry about what your positioning is,” he said. “If we don’t have our health and our energy, we’ve got no shot.”

The Spurs coach has been massaging minutes all season, especially for 30-something stars Tim Duncan and Manu Ginobili. Duncan plays an average of just 28.6 minutes per game — second-lowest in his career — and has been held out of three games altogether.

Ginobili has played in only 21 of 50 games because of a fractured fifth metacarpal on his left hand, a strained left oblique, a strained hip flexor and Popovich’s occasional paranoia that his Argentine star isn’t quite ready to play both ends of back-to-backs.

“I will never be comfortable playing Manu in a back-to-back,” Popovich said. “I only do it when he beats me to a pulp and doesn’t allow me to do what I really want to do, and he intimidates me.

“I let him play once in a while in a back-to-back if he’s looking good and feeling good and needs to get some conditioning in, because he’s still trying to get in good shape. He’s still not there yet.”

Ginobili acknowledges his conditioning level is not where he would like it but believes there is time to regain his explosion and rhythm by season’s end, even if Popovich requires him to miss a game or two.

The seven-game win streak the Spurs brought with them to Cleveland solidified the Spurs’ hold on second in the West.

“It’s building confidence and building a little cushion that can really help you down the stretch,” Ginobili said. “When we have four in five nights in the last few days, that can really help to get a little rest and not risk injuries, because we are tired. So we’ve got to keep winning and especially try to keep getting better.”

Meanwhile, Popovich will continue to shuffle his roster on a game-by-game basis, sizing up the matchups to determine when it’s best to rest a player.

Since Diaw signed with the Spurs after being bought out of his contract with the Bobcats, Popovich gave forward-center Matt Bonner a virtual night off in Sacramento, where he played only 23 seconds, and kept Diaw on the bench in Saturday’s victory over the Pacers.

“There will be different matchups for different games, and I think Pop and the coaches do a great job of figuring out who’s going to be best at this game or that, whether a roller, a popper or a shooter,” said forward Stephen Jackson. “It’s going to be like that, and sometimes it might even have to be me or one of the guards that’s going to have to sacrifice for the betterment of the team.

“At the end of the day, it’s about winning, and that’s all we want to do.”